


The First Path: This was The Plan from the Beginning

by wanderlustlover



Series: The Four Paths Not Taken [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were four ways The Dark Curse was set up to be defeated, before the fifth which led to story which the show has given us. </p><p>In the very first way, The Blue Fairy commissioned Geppetto to build a door in a magical tree that Prince Charming and the pregnant Snow White, carrying The Savior, would make it to the real world and save them all. This is that story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alemara](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alemara/gifts), [zelly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zelly/gifts), [mink](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mink), [ladyoflorien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyoflorien/gifts).



Giving birth in the woods, off the side of a road, where metal beasts roared by louder than screams, was not the fortuitous start anyone had planned for. No one had planned for Snow White to be carried, disheveled and shaking, into the wardrobe by Prince Charming, doing her best not to do the one thing her body was trying: to give birth to their daughter.

Looking back Snow didn't remember the fear or pain as much as she thought she might. Didn't remember the explosion of the tree bark, or the hardness of the dirt, as much as canopy blurring green leaves above them and James' eyes. A blue, dark with concern and steady with unwavering faith, even then.

How she'd laughed through her pain, through their tears and the shreds of her heart screaming for every single friend and person in the kingdoms left behind to her Stepmother's Curse, when James wiped her brow, pulling that smile from whatever place it always lay ready to cheer her, telling her they'd been through so much worse already.

It had been a good contrast for Snow's whisper, soft with beaten exhaustion, even as she strove to hold on. To the child in her arms, to herself, no, to both of them in the circle Charming's arms. Her temple resting against his neck and jaw, both of them staring at her, Emma, their perfect miracle, beyond her heavy destiny.

"We all started here." Here, in a forest. 

Here, in the last place they'd ever expect.


	2. Year One

"And her name?"

When this had started Snow had called herself Mary, after a glance at her husband. The glance was all the conversation she needed. The will that said Regina would come looking, sided with the sorrow at the necessity of the move, had given the name David without needing to think on it.

But they held each other’s gaze at this one last question.  
Through it becoming, "Have you two not picked one?"

Snow was the first one to look away. To her hospital sheets, that she was paler than where her fingers knotted the cloth, and paler yet for what the question asked of her. The first of so many things this whole plan would ask of them.

_Trusting Rumpelstiltskin._

Lying, hiding, taking care of twenty-eight years.

"It's Emma," David said sitting on the side of the bed, and pulling Mary into the curve of his arm at the same time as she gravitated to his nearness. He felt the sigh as the flush of tension released from her body, against him, but he never looked away from the nurse. "Her name's Emma"

They could do all of it So long as they were together.  
They would not give up everything now.

Not when this was the beginning. 

Not when they would win now.


	3. Year Two

The first years are far more different than they are hard, which turns out not to be all that challenging for two people who've spent the better part of the last three years to half decade living lives that were anything but what they had been or had expected them to become.

Their first apartment is what other people call a shoebox, but they are together and for the most part, they don't notice. The world is strange, but as each night passes them untouched they relax more, laugh more, start to spread out a little further into their new lives. 

Emma's firsts, as they check them off in a book gifted by some of their first friends, lead first with squealing glee over her and end the same each time. With the two of them, watching Emma sleep, whispering comments about how they should handle it. The great end. 

They know they can't, and won't, keep it from her. A secret kept at his birth cost him a brother, and his first life. A secret kept in her childhood sentenced her, and with her their whole world. It's never a question of whether they tell their daughter, only one of when.


	4. Year Three

Fairytales are allowed to run as rampant as they are marginalized into obliviousness in this world. The books and movies are counted as the first things that should be shown to children. To encourage their imaginations. To give them constructs. To show them morals. To instruct the ways of right and wrong. 

But the magic is considered just that.

Imagination. Construct. Moral. Untouchable. Unreal. 

The first Halloween was almost staggering. The number of people, children and adults, who had appeared at their door, for candy, dressed as any number of the creatures and friends they'd left behind. A stark reminder that they'd been able, and remained unable still, to find out what might have happened to those left behind. 

If those first years, before Emma is walking and talking, led to a first wave of reticence, it had only taken the first purchase to start a landslide. It only takes the first purchase and they are buying all the books, all the movies. Watching them and reading then, as much for Emma, when she's old enough, as for themselves. 

Looking at each other over pages in large tomes, or talking over watching’s, commenting about all the different choices in all the different telling’s. Never making the mistake again of asking a seller, to direct them to the real stories. Never ending the bemusement of them all counting as "fairy stories."

Red being eaten by wolf, and saved by a huntsman. Ella's pumpkin carriage and mice-horses. The witch and the combs in her own story. The endless nameless Prince Charming's to four princess-wives, and his lack of having his own story.

The first time Emma asks if her stories are real, her father tells her that they are as real as she wants them to be. The second time she asks, her mother asks, instead, if she'd like them to be. 

The answer, of course, is yes. But, then, she is only three.


	5. Year Four

"Dddaaaddd. People are here."

Emma's plaintive voice ringing through the kitchen, earned a shiver of laughter, shifting Snow, from where she stood in his arms, as he'd been placing a kiss on her forehead at the end of their conversation. Both of them turning to take in their daughter as she flounced out of the kitchen at a near run for the first doorbell.

A four year old girl with large sunflower yellow butterfly wings flapping behind her. Even covered in glitter, they are no match for her long golden ribbon curls or bright hazel eyes. Sometimes they both marvel that someone who would stand out so much even in their own world manages to blend in here at all.

They follow her at a distance, hand in hand, watching her welcoming people into their house. Half of whom have been there before, for play dates, and other who are entirely new. The parents who come with them. The way Emma floats among them all, twice as bright as the sun on this day especially. 

If their smiles ride the lines that veer into a quiet press and just about to tremble at times, no one takes much note of it in the hullabaloo. The third mother to arrive even pats Mary on the shoulder and says they were nervous the first time they threw a birthday party, too.


	6. Year Six

"Am I still your princess?"

Emma had sniffled through the whole process, while trying to keep a stiff upper lip. Her hazel eyes sparkling with jewel-drop tears she was steadfastly refusing to let fall and only batted at her face when she was most certainly not being watched.

"Are you _still_ my princess?" David had smiled his crooked smile, his tone teasingly dismissive, as he was tossing the Band-Aid wrapper in the trashcan to the left of the bathroom sink she was perched on. He reached up a hand to cup her cheek. "Falling off a bike could never change that."

It hadn't come up really until Emma was halfway into first grade. It hadn't had a reason to when neither of her parents came here knowing how or what they were originally, nor had a reason to learn in the first decade of her life. Still she'd come home asking why she didn't have a bike, when everyone else in her class had.

"Promise?" Even with her shoulders pinched in, biting her lip, making herself look so endearing through her shock and her eyes darting between the bandage on her knee and her father.

She'd gotten going well enough for about ten feet, today when her training wheels came off, before the wobbling started. Before she'd careened, panicking at her loss of automatic counterbalance, into a blue Chevy, followed quickly by both girl and bike falling over on the street.

David chuckled and leaned back down to place a kiss on the top of her head. "I do. Forever, Emma. Nothing could change that. Not even if you found a way to fall off a mountain."

They divided well, without a word to each other, as though their hearts hadn't frozen as one (for her, and then for themselves, and then for a whole world trapped somewhere horrible) as they'd watched her spill sideways into the car and then onto the asphalt.

David coaxing a shaken Emma and her bike back to the house, while Mary was already waving a hand and headed for their three-down neighbor coming out who owned the car.

"You can't fall off a mountain." Emma said, with waffling between a semi-sharp glance up and a frumping sulk defined by her bottom lip.

"You won't fall off your bike next time either. You'll see," her father said, tugging her off the counter gently. "And once you've mastered that we'll see about teaching you how to ride a horse."


End file.
